As part of a recent survey we asked Register readers to give us some thoughts on a hot area in the storage world but with a slightly provocative edge, namely: “What frustrates you the most about how storage vendors sell their products, and are there any specific irritations in relation to all-flash in particular?”
You clearly …

Have we all been caught asleep at the capacity planning wheel? Business users today want, and expect new IT services to be delivered in the blink of an eye, the necessary resources provisioned instantly, and changes made “on demand”. But such IT flexibility requires that physical resources, server, storage and networking are …

Study
If you spend any time reading vendor press releases you could be forgiven for thinking that IT resources are available in infinite supply at no charge whatsoever. The fact no IT resources are available without cost is rarely mentioned.
The days when the deliberate overprovisioning of resources at day one of a project are long …

Temperature Check
The rate of change in IT and business has never been more rapid. When it comes to how your organisation uses IT, standing still is not an option.
But keeping track of advances in technology and the new solutions becoming available in the market place isn’t always that easy, and few Reg readers have the time or resources to …

The storage solutions you run today face many challenges, of which the explosive growth in data volumes is just one. In a recent survey of Register readers, we asked what currently stresses your storage systems, and what needs to be done to ensure your internal customers get the services they need. The overriding conclusion was …

Networks are the glue that allow users to function effectively in their daily tasks, yet a recent report by Freeform Dynamics based on a survey of readers of the Register shows many of you are using old equipment that is hard to manage. This begs the question, “does senior management really care about the state of enterprise …

In a recent survey over 400 Reg Readers you gave us the inside track on the current state of corporate networks and their ability to handle changing work patterns. In particular, you make the case that your networks are ill prepared to tackle the increasing diversity and sophistication of security threats. As you see it, the …

Many organisations today are facing the challenge of fast-changing operating conditions. At the same time, they are ever more dependent on the data and information they hold. How can they best store and protect corporate data? Is cloud the right answer or only part of it?
Securing and protecting data has been a major issue for …

The cost of supplying IT services inside businesses has never been more visible, with much marketing attention focusing on the question “Why aren’t you using cloud-based services instead of running your own systems?”
More than ever, IT departments are having to justify their funding and show they are doing a good job. Just how …

Over the course of the past year or two we have started to hear that email is becoming less relevant in this era of social networking.
With websites such as Facebook grabbing the world’s attention and organisations encouraged to communicate with all and sundry via sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, many are seriously …

Every IT professional understands that relational databases play an important role in most organisations. Indeed, the previous article in this series highlighted that such repositories are used to hold business critical data in many organisations. Such “traditional platforms” are not only widely deployed, they are also well …

Analysis
Anyone currently employed in any area of the IT business will be aware, however reluctantly, of the considerable amount of effort being put into marketing ‘Big Data’. Well brace yourselves, there's more of this to come.
During August and September of 2012 Freeform Dynamics surveyed 502 IT professional readers of The Register …

When systems are implemented and managed in isolation, it can be difficult to get an end-to-end view of how they interact.
That in turn makes it difficult to troubleshoot problems when they arise and to understand the impact potential changes are likely to have.
We know from research conducted over several years that few …

“Dynamic workload management” and “private cloud” are just two of the terms currently in vogue to describe new approaches to the management of IT systems.
Dynamic IT is likely to be marketed as a fully automated environment where everything is controlled in an orchestrated manner.
We know from a recent survey that a growing …

For most of the past 20 years, the provisioning and daily operations of IT systems has been mainly concerned with specifying the physical components – servers, storage and networking – required to deliver the expected service levels.
Because many workloads have little hard data upon which to base usage calculations, most …

Reg Research
For much of the last decade data centre networking, along with networking in general, has become accepted as part of the glue that is invisible to business users.
End users now take for granted that networking ‘works’, but with new services placing greater stress on data centre networks, what do organisations think about the …

Economic pressure has led to more finance directors and CFOs scrutinising expenditure to a painstaking level of detail. The aim is to ensure that IT can deliver what the business needs at the lowest cost while still meeting the never-diminishing expectations of the board and shareholders.
As a result, in-depth examinations …

IT architects and CIOs have a number of factors to take into consideration when it comes to selecting where to run workloads and how to design systems for efficient operations over extended periods of time.
Chief amongst these are the nature of the workloads themselves, the operating systems on which they are supported and the …

Management in IT is a challenge for many organisations. Integrated management is a tough nut to crack and many companies struggle with fragmented management environments just to keep their systems operational.
Without integrated tools and processes, organisations face considerable security challenges, specifically difficulties …

Workshop
It is not only data centres and computer rooms that have started down the path of the “strategic consolidation” of resources. Whilst organisations rightly rate their people as amongst their most valuable assets, many have also begun to optimise the accommodation that they make available to their workers.
The shift to “hot …

Workshop
It is a commonly held principle in many areas of business that if you can’t measure something “quantitatively”, it will be difficult to raise the quality objectively. The applicability of this statement to the world of IT security is clear. Without having some form of metrics in place, it is tough, if not impossible, to judge …

Workshop
Every IT professional recognises the importance of securing the IT systems that are now at the heart of many business processes. This recognition goes beyond simple deployment of security technologies.
As Register readers have told us, drivers such as compliance with regulatory pressures, minimising financial risks, securing …

Workshop
In the current economic climate access to spending money is tight across all businesses. In truth, the spotlight has been thrown ever more closely onto IT spend over the course of the last decade, not just the past two years. This focus on IT spend has brought forward the question of the best way to budget for IT systems and …

Workshop
Ask any IT manager, business leader or regulator and they will tell you that IT security is important - that much goes without saying.
As the chart below shows, for many professionals the role of security in IT is now seen to be a fundamental part of delivering day to day IT service to users, wherever they are, whenever they …

Workshop
Over the last year or so Freeform Dynamics has asked Reg readers if the new flexibility in deploying workloads in virtualised server infrastructures makes it possible to manage application delivery effectively while minimising the costs associated with delivering services.
We have also considered the challenges around …